The original manuscript reads “their land of inheritance”, which is very unusual when compared with the rest of the text. Elsewhere, the word inheritance is always preceded by some kind of determiner or modifier (58 times), as shown by the following statistics:
| their inheritance | 26 |
| their first inheritance | 3 |
| our inheritance | 8 |
| our first inheritance | 2 |
| your inheritance | 5 |
| his inheritance | 3 |
| thine inheritance | 2 |
| an inheritance | 4 |
| the inheritance of my seed | 1 |
| the inheritance of thy seed | 1 |
| our father’s inheritance | 1 |
| our fathers’ first inheritance | 1 |
| their fathers’ first inheritance | 1 |
In particular, Lehi’s family inheritance is otherwise always referred to as “the land of X’s inheritance”:
Thus the one occurrence of “their land of inheritance” (in 1 Nephi 10:3) could well be an error in the original manuscript.
We can find manuscript evidence showing that Oliver Cowdery tended to move a possessive pronoun forward in a construction of the form “the X ofY”:
Both of these errors are in the printer’s manuscript, not the original manuscript; and the scribe is Oliver Cowdery, not scribe 3 of 𝓞. Moreover, in both cases, Oliver caught his error and corrected it in 𝓟. For one possible example in 3 Nephi, the error might not have been caught until much later. In this case, both the printer’s manuscript and the 1830 edition are firsthand copies of the original manuscript, and they both read the same, so apparently the original manuscript also read “and their privileges of their church”:
It is possible that the 1920 LDS emendation, “and the privileges of their church”, is how the original text actually read. So if there is an error in 3 Nephi 2:12, it probably occurred as Oliver Cowdery wrote down Joseph Smith’s dictation. If so, this would be a third example of the being replaced by their in anticipation of a following their.
One difference between these three examples and the one in 1 Nephi 10:3 is that the following their was not deleted in any of the three other examples—that is, these three examples suggest that if the original text in 1 Nephi 10:3 had been “the land of their inheritance”, then the mistake should have been “their land of their inheritance”. Instead, scribe 3 of 𝓞 wrote “their land of inheritance”. So there isn’t a perfect match between these three examples of scribal error and the earliest text in 1 Nephi 10:3.
Furthermore, there are a number of scribal and printing errors that show a strong tendency to produce errors favoring the expected phraseology of “the land(s) of their inheritance”:
Clearly, Oliver Cowdery expected the phraseology “the land(s) of their inheritance”.
Ultimately, we have to recognize that the earliest textual reading for 1 Nephi 10:3 is completely understandable. Even though a scribal error may be involved, it is probably safest to retain this unique reading, since it does occur in the earliest textual source, the original manuscript.
Summary: Restore the unique reading “their land of inheritance” in 1 Nephi 10:3, even though it may be an error for “the land of their inheritance” (the reading in 𝓟).